Pointroll’s AdControl is a very powerful tool. So much so, that it becomes somewhat difficult to explain and talk about to others at times. However within the below interactive demo, this complexity issue is solved. Basically it allows business rules to be created that give advertisers more control of the content within their rich media ad unit.
A rule might be when a user fitting the profile of “Type 1″ comes in contact with a PaperBoy ad that is about to render, always make sure to show a background image of a tool shed, use a call to action that includes the copy “Roll over” and to display a bag of all purpose fertilizer. Or if you are a visual person, display this exact combination within the ad unit as follows:
Input: User Type1. Output: Tool shed background image + "Roll Over" call to action copy + "Vigoro Fertilizer" product
Pretty darn cool. The combinations are endless. However the real fun begins when one starts to bring in publisher supplied BT data such as gender, age and interest(s) of the user. Then these types of rules become very powerful once you layer in the auto optimization factors that the system (e.g., AdControl) offer so that the most successful (which can be custom configured) ad combinations receive the highest amount of impressions.
This is a very visual way of showing how different pieces of PaperBoy ad content such as the call to action copy, products or the background image can be tied to specific user types (or BT segments in some cases)
Vibrant Media blends the best of both search & display advertising. It allows an advertiser to target the content within a publisher page on a keyword basis and upon a user initiated interaction with the green double-underlined keyword within the content of the page, a graphic display ad appears that allows rich media content to be inserted instantly.
Vibrant & ShopLocal have come together to form a joint partnership that brings the weekly ad to growing in-text advertising marketplace
ShopLocal has officially partnered with Vibrant to take the best of each others offerings to market. This means that the localized promotional content that ShopLocal brings can be distributed on a contextual targeted basis which will drive traffic back into the relevant area of a retailer’s online weekly ad (SmartCircular) site. This hybrid ad format can be bought on an CPC (Cost Per Click) or a CPV (Cost Per View) basis directly through the Vibrant sales channels.
Here is a mocked up sample of what the flash based Vibrant Media ads look like. This ad for example would be triggered by the keyword 'sunglasses'.
Maybe the simplest way to understand what this new partnership and localized in-text ads are is to imagine if a Pointroll PaperBoy rich media display ad had a baby with a Google AdSense paid search ad, their offspring would be a Vibrant Media Localized In-Text ad.
This joint partnership offering is a great blur of search and display ads. If offers:
- Localized content: Since weekly ad content is what is being featured within the Vibrant Media ads, the ad serving needs to be sensitive to the user’s geography so that the right version of the weekly ad content can be displayed
- Dynamic updating: The keywords that are targeted, the ad content and the landing pages are all automatically synced every day to ensure that only live and active weekly ad content is being used to content keyword target and populate the user initiated in-text ads.
- Keyword targeting: Vibrant Media’s system works by going after specific keywords contained within a great network of publisher’s content within a specific geo-location
- Product specific landing pages: The product featured within the ad is connected to the same item within the weekly ad site
- Rich reporting: Able to measure metrics such as the number of users that interacted with the ad and the number of users that clicked thru from the ad to the online weekly ad site
Akamai Technologies, Inc. today announced the results of an independent performance assessment of its IP location service conducted by Gomez, Inc. The Akamai IP location service provides a range of insight for content providers about an Internet end user’s geographic location including country, state, city, zip code, area code, as well as device type, connection type, and actual connection speed, among others.
ShopLocal for many years has relied heavily upon Akamai's content distribution network (CDN) for site and media caching as well as their great GeoIP targeting services.
Results from the Gomez audit show that Akamai achieved 100 percent accuracy – providing an exact match for every IP address – at the country level on a global scale, and at the state and city level within the U.S. Akamai also achieved 97.22 percent accuracy when determining IP addresses at the city level across the globe.
Akamai customers leverage its IP location service for multiple use cases, including:
- Marketing – create a personalized end-user experience by delivering geographically-targeted information, such as language, pricing, advertising, shipping instructions
- Fraud Protection – identify patterns for proxy hijacking of banking and retail transactions
- Mobile Device Detection – tailor content based on end users’ device
- Rights Management / Compliance – comply with the digital rights of licensed content and meet regulatory compliance restrictions on software downloads
- Security – monitor access to corporate networks
“ShopLocal uses Akamai to identify, by IP address, the location from which an end user is accessing our site,” said Edward McLaughlin, Senior Director of Technology at ShopLocal. “This technology has been instrumental for us to automatically present content and localized promotions best suited for the location of our Client’s end users. Our Client’s customers expect a very personalized experience, so the accuracy of Akamai’s IP location data is paramount to the success of their online offerings.”
“Our Clients that leverage automatic IP location data see a 13 percent increase in conversion rate of first-time visitors compared to clients that require their first-time visitors to provide their location by entering their zip code manually,” said Loch Rose, Vice President of Analytics at ShopLocal.
To learn more about the Gomez audit click here.
This is a really big deal. To fully onboard and integrate around the (below) top portal publishers and ad networks that have demographic AND behavioral (collectively referred to as “BT data herein) data on their users in a way so that Pointroll PaperBoy ads can use these user-level BT insights to actually change WHAT content is actually shown within the ad units. This is cutting edge, one-to-one data driven marketing. Every single ad that gets served has the potential to be different and uniquely tailored (from a content perspective) for every unique user.
- Platform-a: There are two (2) parts that make collectively makeup Platform-a which are…
- Advertising.com (the 3rd party ad network)
- AOL (owned and operated sites that are BT powered by Tacoda)
- quadrantONE
- CollectiveMedia
- Yahoo!
These are the current publisher / ad network partners that ShopLocal and Pointroll have integrated the publisher provided BT data into the PaperBoy product. More publishers are in the works that will be launching soon.
At an unique user level (so for any given ad impression), these premier publishers and ad networks typically can provide the below insights:
- ZIP Code (and sometimes other higher level GeoLocation data is available)
- Gender
- Race
- Age / Year Of Birth (sometimes age ranges and sometimes exact birth year)
- Categor(ies) Of Interest (that the user has shown a past interest in – can be multiple)
- Publisher Property Type (helps determine the context of publisher page were the ad will be inserted – ex. finance.yahoo.com
- Publisher Page Position (helps determine the actual placement of the ad – ex. MPU above the fold)
- Publisher Page Context Keyword(s)
A couple of important notes however around these publishers provided BT targeting data:
- The amount (eg depth) of BT insights for any given ad impressions varies per publisher from some impressions having:
- No BT data available
- Only some BT data available
- Very complete sets of BT data available
- Which BT data points are collected and maintained varies from publisher to publisher. Not everyone for example has age data on it’s users
- The BT data collection methodology greatly varies from publisher to publisher. How extensive and wide any given publishers reaches into web logs, search histories, registration data, etc is all part of the secret special sauce that each publisher maintains
- The frequency of how often the BT data is updated is also a variable across publishers
- Storage, re-use and re-distribution of this publisher owned and controlled BT data is clearly prohibited and ShopLocal and Pointroll tightly adhere to this policy as it helps protects our publisher partner’s interests
- Privacy is one of the biggest concerns throughout the entire process. With all the recent self-imposed industry regulations around BT targeted online advertising, all parties have been very careful to be very respectful of the end users’ privacy throughout all of the design and integrations steps. Our goal is to actual try to offer user a more personalized, more relevant overall site experience which includes the content within the display ads
- From a publisher perspective: All information about any given user is 100% anonymous with no personally identifiable information (PII) being passed over to ShopLocal or Pointroll
- From an ad server (Pointroll) perspective: All ads do not directly capture any PII which includes, but isn’t limited to, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and credit card numbers. No sensitive information is collected via the the ads. We even extend this by not allowing the cookies dropped to users machines to associate with any personally-identifiable information. (For purposes of this post, personally-identifiable information doesn’t include IP addresses or ZIP code)
- From a localized content provider (ShopLocal) perspective: No PII is collected or stored or the user
Some of the next steps that the ShopLocal and Pointroll teams are gearing up to undertake:
The team actually did it. After months of internal R&D, the first SmartSearch campaign is finally live on Google for JCPenney (only for the Kansas City DMA currently) and on Yahoo!. This marks a historic day here at ShopLocal as the SmartSearch product allows for fully automated, localized search engine marketing (SEM) on both Google & Yahoo!. Below is an actual screen shot from a Google search result page for the keyword “womens apparel” that comes back with a SmartSearch paid in the top paid position:
The SmartSearch ad on this LIVE Google search result page is the very first paid ad in the top ranked spot. Note that within this particular screenshot the organic search results are from Chicago, but all of the paid ads are from the Kansas City DMA area due to fact that ShopLocal is located in Chicago
And here is what a user would see if they actual clicked on the Google ad:
Notice how the SmartCircular landing page is loaded with localized, relevant content to the search term "womens apparel".
And just to be fair to our good friends over at Y!, here is how the same live SmartSearch campaign shows up within a Yahoo! search results page (SRP) for the keyword “bedding” within the Kansas City geo-location:
The SmartSearch ad for JCP is showing up in the fourth (4th) position in the paid search portion within Yahoo! currently
A few of the most notable differences between this specific search effort and all the rest of the pack of typical paid search campaigns is:
- Hyper-Local Focus so that a retailer’s store foot print drives where the ads will be shown and what content will be within any given ad. So if there are no “shoes” on sale within some store locations, then those underlying geographies of the country would not get targeted with a search keyword of “shoes”
- In-Store Focused Conversion instead of the typical online or eCommerce sale based conversion. This type of paid search campaign is not intended to drive online orders, but rather shoppers into local stores that make purchases offline
- In-Store Sale Based Content as the circular or weekly ad is the underlying source of this promotional store focused set of keyword ads. This helps leverage this core existing offline assets
- Full Automation of the creation of all the localized keywords, ad copy and landing page URLs. Once a set of ad copy templates are setup and agreed to by the client and/or agency, this entire process of determining what keywords should be active for what markets and what the associated ad copy and landing page URLs should be is all system driven. The sheer volume of keywords and associated ad copy and landing page URLs would never be possible to be done by humans on a week in and week out basis
Some of the key features that SmartSearch has built in version 1.0 are:
- Fully dynamic and localized search ad copy that can pull in the correct, localized information in regards to:
- # of Items On Sale within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Example: 35 Deals (on womens apparel items on sale)
- Relevant & Exact Keyword
- Price Range, from lowest priced item and/or to highest price item of the all the items within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Retailer Location, as expressed via a mixture of City Name, State Abbreviation, or ZIP Code
- Example: Shop Your Local K. C. (Kansas City, MO)
- Retailer Name
- Sale End Date of the in-store promotion that this content is being drawn from
- Example: Sale Ends Jun 30
- Auto ad copy template selection so that when some of the above dynamic ad copy variables get too long (total # of characters), the systems gracefully falls back through a series of alternate ad copy templates selecting the one that best fits the dynamic data being thrown at it and at the same time attempting to maximize all available allowable characters within both the headline/title and the description line(s)
- Client specific business rules can be created and applied so that each unique advertiser can tune the ad copy templates and associated landing pages (very powerful)
- Fully dynamic and localized landing page (via a precisely relevant click thru URL) that takes the user deep within the ShopLocal hosted SmartCircular site
- Support for third party bidding and management tools so that search agencies can still use their same tool sets to manage these localized paid search campaigns in a native manner
- Support for both Google and Yahoo! paid search campaigns. The other search engines are not supported currently, but that doesn’t mean too much as they all collectively only represent less than 15% of the overall US search volume as of May 2009 (comScore data)
Here is a practical break down of how the two JSP example (live) ads from both Google and Yahoo! actually breakdown according to the ad copy specifications imposed by each search engine:
- Google AdWords
- Keyword: Womens Apparel
- Headline (25 characters max): Apparel At JCPenney
- Line 1 (35 characters max): 35 Deals Starting At $4 Visit
- Line 2 (35 characters max): Your Local JCPenney By Jun 30
- Yahoo! Search Marketing
- Keyword: Bedding
- Title (40 characters max): Bedding From $5
- Description (70 characters max): Shop Your Local K.C. JCPenney Store. Sale Ends Jun 30.
For another look at what the SmartSearch product looks like in action, you can personally check it out by using the Google Preview Ad Tool. Just click the image above and make sure to enter a keyword of "womens apparel" and select a State location of "Missouri ---Kansas City MO" and you'll get to see localized search in action.
Finally, a special thanks to the JCP and 360i (JCP’s search agency) teams for all working really hard on this launch and making hyper-local paid search a reality.
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